Verifiable Markets on the blockchain

I am currently working on something that includes this new notion of Verifiable Markets. This was output of many conversations with Juan, Matt (from Protocol Labs), Christian Catalini (from MIT Sloan).

While I will soon post some more formal work on this, I think it is really important to present some form of understanding behind Verifiable Markets, what they are and why they are important.11 This post is being taken from my recent series of tweets on Verifiable Markets

(Verifiable) Market Protocols are another killer app for blockchain/decentralized tech. A Market Protocol models the exchange of a good or a service between a buyer and a seller and it is Verifiable if the exchange can be publicly verified by both party and any user interested in verifying the exchange.

It is important to note that:

Fair Exchange: The exchange of payment/service only happens if the provider of the service can prove they should be rewarded.

Decentralized Market: When built on a public ledger, the market is not operated by a central exchange, but by a network of users.

Proofs: As long as one can prove the exchange of a good or the correct execution of a service, then we can have Verifiable Market Protocols. For example, in systems such as Filecoin, we need to prove that storage providers have correctly stored the data via Proofs of Storage.

The reason why I find this direction of work really exciting, is that we can now create new (verifiable market) protocols that connect demand and offer of a specific good/service in a verifiable and decentralised way.

There are a lot of Verifiable Markets that I look forward to see. An example is energy: if we can prove that electricity has been moved from a place to another, then we can have a decentralised energy market (and many others).